Book Review: XSLT

USALUG writes “XSLT: Being a big fan of only doing work once, the premise of XSLT, the Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations, is an irresistible draw â€“ create your data once, in a well-defined XML format, then use XSLT to transform the data into various formats, including HTML, PDF, or any arbitrary (possibly proprietary) protocol.

Doug Tidwell’s XSLT: Mastering XML Transformations is an excellent way to quickly dive into XSLT. Tidwell starts off with some basics â€“ what XSLT is, why it’s useful, what tools can be used with it, and how to get a basic XSLT processing system up and running. Chapter 2, appropriately titled â€œThe Obligatory Hello World Exampleâ€, contains what its name indicates, along with a thorough walk-through of how the stylesheet and XML document are processed by the XSLT tools. Tidwell then provides several more XSLT variations on the Hello, World theme, converting the same XML file into HTML (the original example), PDF, VRML, SVG, and even a Java Hello World program.”